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Hands-On Labs, XTreme Spear Tossing, and ClickOnce

  • Artigo

Judging from your feedback and the kind responses I received today, yesterday’s Introduction to .Net Hands-On Lab was a great success!  If you'd like, you can download the course notes here.  Here's a quick recap of the day.

In the morning, we used Visual Studio 2005 to build and deploy a simple application, and presented data from a SQL Server 2005 database in a grid.   

Then, after lunch, things got a little more extreme, as everyone built their own rendition of Cuchulainn’s XTreme Spear Toss.NET, the intense video gaming experience that will be sweeping the charts this holiday season.  The game starred Cuchulainn himself, Irish legend and star of The Tain, who practices his spear tossing skills across the windswept landscape of the Windows Form.  Some of the participants at yesterday's lab augmented the basic game with some cool features – such as Stephen Lacey's prize-winning version that involved moving obstacles, varying windspeed, and even a leaping fish which Cuchulainn could spear for bonus points and dinner.  Now if that’s not XTreme, I don’t know what is.

Finally, we leapt from the land of Irish legend to the green fields of ASP.NET 2.0, where we explored Master Pages, and again extracted data from a SQL Server 2005 database, this time onto master/detail page views.

So the day offered a good lap around Visual Studio 2005, and let participants get a taste of both the Windows Forms and ASP.NET development worlds. 

Attending an event like this Hands-On Lab gives you a chance to explore the technologies yourself, and then head home with resources like the Express Edition to dig deeper into areas of personal interest.  I hope this will be the first of many such labs for us here: not just introductory ones, but also “drill-downs” into the different .NET technologies.  Thanks to everyone who participated!!

 

One question I got yesterday was about ClickOnce, the new deployment technology that will be introduced with Visual Studio 2005 for Windows Forms applications.  The question was about where ClickOnce stores the applications that it installs, and whether you can modify that location.  It turns out that ClickOnce applications are always installed under the Apps folder in My Documents.  Installed ClickOnce applications have to play by some relatively strict rules: they are isolated from one another, and they can’t modify the target computer.  Thus, ClickOnce is the ideal way to quickly and safely deploy some types of applications.  There are others, however, for which Windows Installer (MSI) will still be most appropriate.  About half-way down this page is a great feature-by-feature comparison of ClickOnce and MSI, and this MSDN article goes into great detail about them both.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2005
    "Now if that’s not XTreme, I don’t know what is."

    Puh-leese.
  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2005
    Halo 2 watch out, that's all I have to say ;)